Yussef allied himself with the ruler of Tunis and with his brother Hamet to mount a resistance against Ali Bourghol. The Jews of Tripoli helped finance the mission. The well-trained troops of Yussef and an army from Tunis attacked Tripoli. The end was swift.
“The pacha usurper [Ali Bourghol] departed as he had arrived, a pirate,” stated the French consul. “He wanted to squeeze the last drop out of the sponge but the enemy was already firing bombs into the city.” Bourghol began to massacre hostages, decapitated eleven Christian slaves, and even killed his own officers to take their loot; he departed around 3 A.M. on January 16, 1795, taking a French merchant ship with him. “One could compare the flight of the pacha to the end of a plague, as the aftermath was so sweet.”
On January 19, Hamet and his brother Yussef entered the city triumphant; the people of Tripoli welcomed them enthusiastically “with expressions of joy as lively as sincere.” The ruler of Tunis had convinced the old Bashaw to step down, and Hamet, twenty-nine years old, found himself proclaimed Bashaw of Tripoli.
He discovered the treasury empty. Ali Bourghol had stripped the palace down to the last stick of furniture. With no money to pay the army and with the Bedouin camped outside the city threatening to attack, Hamet was forced to borrow 60,000 Venetian sequins to bribe the Bedouin to leave. Hamet also begged the foreign consulates to lend him furniture, and he received, for instance, from the British: silver candlesticks and snuffers, an English sofa, some chairs, a mahogany dining table.
The English consul, Simon Lucas, was not the least bit impressed with the new ruler, Hamet. “The Bashaw Sidy Hamed, having at best a weak understanding, gave himself entirely up to his pleasures, was almost in a constant state of inebriation and consequently neglected the government. Sidy Joseph (Yussef) who is quite the opposite character of his brother neither drinks nor smokes and, having studied for some years in the school of adversity, acquired a thorough knowledge of the constitution of the government and of the disposition of his subjects, who love him almost to adoration, and had been frequently applied to in private by the principal people to salvage his country from total ruin by wresting the reins of government out of his brother’s hands.”
(An earlier French consul disagreed; he described Hamet as “very affable” and said most diplomats dreaded that Yussef, “sanguinary and ferocious,” might one day rule.)
On June 11, Hamet invited his brother to go gazelle hunting with him in the dunes by the city. (Hamet never left the city without his brother, for fear of treachery.) Yussef accepted the invitation but after leaving with his brother, secretly doubled back, killed the gatehouse guards, and ordered the city gates shut. Cannon fire announced the betrayal.
Hamet fled. Bedouin sheiks honored the laws of hospitality but would not rally to his cause. Hamet put up no fight. Yussef offered Hamet a choice: return to Tripoli and live a retired life with his family under house arrest or take the governorship of Derne and Bengazi, rich provinces to the east. Hamet accepted the governorship, but for the time being, Yussef kept Hamet’s family—his wife, Lilly Howviva, and his three sons and two daughters—as hostages. A storm forced Hamet’s ship to Malta, and fearing treachery, he decided to flee to Tunis. So began the captivity of Hamet’s family inside the castle of Tripoli, and Hamet’s exile.
For the past nine years, Yussef had ruled Tripoli with an iron fist, establishing law and order, restoring the Jews to revive commerce, and revamping the corsair fleet to extort tribute money from European governments. He gradually repaired the castle and replenished the treasury. The French government, post-Revolution, sent him a shipload of trinkets looted from the homes of aristocrats: carpets, mirrors, chandeliers. Yussef was using a bidet as a fountain until the English consul informed him of its proper function.
Over the years, Yussef married a second wife, an African, to go along with his first wife, a cousin who at age twelve had given birth to his first child. By age twenty-one she had given birth to three sons and three daughters. His black wife had given birth to one son and two daughters.
Now, on this day in early September of 1804, Yussef was fulfilling the family tradition of ruthlessness. He encouraged his people to hurl insults at the corpses of the American sailors; he let stray dogs gnaw on their bodies. His brother Hamet’s family remained hostages in the castle, scorned, disgraced. And weak wandering Hamet—on whom American hopes were pinned—was nowhere to be found. Rumor had him somewhere in Egypt.
CHAPTER 8
The Mission: Eaton Unleashed
JUST AFTER DAWN, Commodore Samuel Barron in the privacy of his cabin aboard the USS President off the coast of Tripoli handed a set of orders to Isaac Hull, the thirty-one-year-old captain of the brig Argus. William Eaton stood nearby and recorded what happened next in an entry in his notebook under the heading “Secret Verbal Orders of Commodore Barron to Captain Hull . . . in the presence of the undersigned . . . Sept. 15, 1804.” Both Eaton and Hull later signed it as witnesses, and Eaton gave three additional signed copies to officers to carry home to the United States.